Chair ball at HP

My experience with corporate boards and strategy always reminds me of Dave Barry's depiction of the journalist staff at the Miami Herald: a bunch of childish guys zooming around the board room on roller chairs trying to dunk a wad of paper in the trash can. Boards and executives are just like the rest of us.

My experience with corporate boards and strategy always reminds me of Dave Barry's depiction of the journalist staff at the Miami Herald: a bunch of childish guys zooming around the board room on roller chairs trying to dunk a wad of paper in the trash can. Boards and executives are just like the rest of us. They are making things up as they go along. In the case of the latest debacle in HP's board room the Chairman and maybe even the CEO, and certainly the legal staff of HP, were incensed at the leaking of information by a director and hired Private Investigators to figure out who it was. The PI's used pretexting (lying) to get phone records.

A question. Why is anyone upset by this? After all, only if you had something to hide should you be worried about someone knowing your phone calls. (In case you don't know me this is a completely facetious question.)

And, I cannot help but think about the Israeli Trojan incident of over a year ago. It that case it appears that the Haephrati's were incarcerated and only now are the PIs being tried. But what about the executives of the dozens of organizations that hired the PIs to use Trojan horse malware to steal competitor's information? When are they going to be tried?

Oh, yes. A quick suggestion for the board members of HP. Have you received any suspicious emails from HP lately? Ones with Trojan horses attached to them perhaps?

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